“Got it.” With that, Miyoshi called forth Glas.

  Apparently pleased that I was conceding the spotlight for a change, he stood proudly up from his haunches and struck an imposing stance. With a cocky attitude like that, you’d better not screw up, got it?

  “What the hell are the police doing, anyway?” The police would’ve been able to perform a proper investigation of all this. Though a lot of the time, police in TV shows either vanished mysteriously after seeing something they shouldn’t have, or ended up having been on the bad guys’ payroll from the very start.

  “I hope Saito is okay,” Miyoshi mused. “It’s almost lunchtime.”

  “Did we pass any police stations on the way here...?”

  “The only one I saw was the Fukutani Police Substation—the building with the fish scale roof.”

  “Oh yeah, that. How far away was that, maybe ten kilometers and some change?” I estimated.

  “If she didn’t run into any trouble, she would’ve made it there a long time ago. And if she got as far as the area where you stopped by that shrine, she’d have reception on her phone, wouldn’t she?”

  “I guess so, yeah. Anyway, as soon as Glas gets back, let’s return to the hotel.”

  “Roger that.”

  A few minutes later, Glas returned, shaking his head. Mitsurugi hadn’t been inside the church after all.

  ***

  When we got back to the hotel on the hill, Saito was already there in the lobby, putting some things in order while she waited for us.

  “A landslide just in front of the gate...?”

  “Yup,” Saito confirmed. “There was no way I was gonna get past it, so I turned back.”

  “It must’ve been all that rain last night...” I grumbled.

  “That would explain why the police haven’t shown up too,” Miyoshi added.

  “Don’t they have police boats or something?”

  “Well, I doubt the police substation we passed had one, at least.”

  Why does everything seem to be going wrong for us? If nothing else, as long as we keep our eyes on the harbor, it’s highly unlikely they’d be able to take Mitsurugi out of the village. Though if Dagon ends up being real, they won’t exactly need to...

  “Hey, Earth to Coach!” Saito waved at me. “I’m not done with my report yet!”

  “Hm? What else happened?”

  “Well...”

  According to her, she had encountered another person standing on the other side of the gate while she was turning back.

  “Someone was out there?”

  “Yeah. We had a brief chat, and she told me there was a tiny farming village beyond the gate with only a few houses left in it.”

  We had gone through the gate on our way in, but there had been another path nearby that bypassed the gate entirely, which we hadn’t taken. I thought I had heard something about an abandoned mine in the area at one point, but nothing about a village.

  “A farming village, huh?”

  “Mm-hmm. So I went ahead and checked it out.”

  The old woman said that the normally bustling village of Sukusu had seemed awfully quiet for the past few days. Then, the night prior, she had heard some suspicious noises coming from the area. Fearing that Tsubaki’s descendants had come out to roam once again, she’d cautiously come out to take a look.

  I nodded.

  “But it turned out to just be a landslide, huh?”

  “Um, excuse me, but who are ‘Tsubaki’s descendants’?” Miyoshi asked, her expression making it clear that she had no idea what that was supposed to mean.

  Well of course you have no idea. And neither do I, for that matter.

  “Beats me,” Saito replied.

  “What?” Miyoshi blinked. “You didn’t ask her?”

  “No, I asked! But I didn’t really get it.”

  Based on what Saito had heard, some sort of incident had occurred twenty-four years ago. There had been a small group of people living in a shrine nearby—one that had since been abandoned. They’d gotten into a quarrel with the villagers, ended up getting kicked out, and that was that, apparently.

  “So they were squatters, then?” I asked. “The locals should’ve just asked the local police to evict them, right? Isn’t it illegal for citizens to do that on their own?”

  It turned out that hadn’t been the end of the incident, though. The people who had been kicked out brought in a bunch of shipping containers, seeking refuge along the path between the gate they had left through and the community of Tomari. This time, however, the people outside the village had ended up chasing them off.

  “Oh! That explains the shipping containers we saw here and there on the way in!” Daiei owned the Fukuoka Hawks from 1989 to 2004. Obviously something had happened during that interval, but I had no idea it had been something so drastic. What kind of life must it have been for those people, being cooped up inside giant metal boxes with no windows?

  Miyoshi furrowed her brow.

  “I was also curious about why the containers were all smashed up like that... Wouldn’t this have been considered some kind of riot, though? I wonder why it wasn’t all over the news?”

  If a major act of violence like that had happened, it would’ve easily made nationwide news. Yet we had never heard anything about it whatsoever.

  That reminded me of something: The man I had met back at the Wakasahiko and Wakasahime shrines had seemed awfully perturbed when I had mentioned Sukusu. If the incident had taken place back when he was a kid, he might’ve had a good reason to be averse to the name.

  “So what happened? Did they take a lynch mob out there, kill everyone, then swear a solemn oath together to never speak of it again?”

  “If they had done that, Miyoshi, the old lady wouldn’t have said a word about it to Saito.”

  “Huh. Fair point.”

  “Also, Saito, this is all about some local community drama. How does the part about Tsubaki’s descendants fit in?”

  “Um, about that...”

  I shot Saito a puzzled look. She hesitated for a few moments, as if trying to work up the courage to say something, then finally spoke.

  “Coach, do you believe in immortality?”

  As distanced from reality as it was, when that word of power suddenly struck my ears, I could only squeak out a ridiculous-sounding response.

  “Heh. I knew it was gonna be something like that...”

  Saito let out a sigh, as if she had known exactly how I was going to react. It was like a young preacher realizing for the first time that it was impossible to make others believe something that you didn’t believe yourself.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “there were rumors that the people who had been expelled from the area were members of a local clan of immortals, and apparently everyone was super afraid of them.”

  Dumbstruck by the unexpected twist to the story, Miyoshi and I could only stare in astonishment.

  “Is that what it meant...?”

  Not quite following Miyoshi’s puzzling question, Saito cocked her head to the side.

  “What what meant?”

  “Oh, um, well, there’s that one saying: Old camellias turn into terrible things!”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s specifically talking about yokai,” I pointed out.

  “Clans of the undying are definitely yokai material!” Miyoshi countered.

  I shrugged in defeat.

  “Can’t really argue with that, I guess...”

  Apparently the old woman Saito talked to hadn’t directly referred to the clan as “immortals.” Instead, she’d mentioned things like how she had encountered them both as a child and as an adult, and they looked exactly the same both times. Supposedly her grandmother had told her a similar story, as had many others, leading her to an unspoken but obvious conclusion.

  “So we’re assuming they actually were descendants of Camulia, who was also said to have remained forever young...” The problem was, there was no mention in any records of her having any children.

  “Apparently some of them were also rather, um, horrific-looking...” Saito murmured vaguely, turning her gaze downward. There had been plenty of awful cases of discrimination and persecution across the world up through the present day.

  “Considering the historical context...maybe it was leprosy?” I theorized.

  “If it was, would that mean the shrine was being used as some kind of isolation facility? Meaning they weren’t illegally squatting after all?” Saito knitted her brow. “I wonder why they kicked them out all of a sudden, then...”

  “Good question.”

  “Hey, Kei,” Miyoshi chimed in. “I’d understand if it had happened in the same time period as Castle of Sand was set in, but this was supposedly only twenty-four years ago. Could that even have happened so recently?”

  “Japan didn’t repeal its Leprosy Prevention Law until maybe a year after the supposed incident. It wouldn’t surprise me if there had been lingering problems in certain regions. Though it would strike me as more than a little odd for that to be the driving reason behind all this.”

  The place where Tsubaki’s descendants lived, huh...

  “I think I’ll check out that abandoned shrine after we’re done here.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s pretty close by, nobody goes near it, and it was used for isolation. It might even have some kind of special setup for locking people inside.”

  “So a perfect place to hide Mitsurugi?” Miyoshi asked.

  “Potentially.”

  “In that case, we’ll come with—”

  “I’d rather go alone. We have no idea what might end up happening there.” Isolated or otherwise special places seemed rather risky to visit, as we’d ended up learning at the church earlier. The last thing I wanted was for us to go out searching for Mitsurugi and end up with more victims instead. I was pretty confident I could handle things on my own, but it would’ve been pretty rough protecting two other people against multiple aggressors.

  Miyoshi seemed to pick up on that and nodded quickly in response.

  “So what do you want us to do?”

  “I’m not sure, really. All I’m sure of is that something strange is going on. Do whatever you want, just make sure the two of you stay together at all times. And if you run into any trouble, get the hell out of there right away.”

  The line between reality and fiction was getting blurrier by the moment. It felt as though it would only take one more slight push to be able to move between the two unimpeded.

  “Oh, that reminds me. Saito,” I began.

  “Hm? What’s up?”

  “What was the name of the person who invited you to stay at this place?”

  “Huh? You mean Mr. Marsh?”

  “Marsh?”

  “The name on the invitation was B. Marsh, if I remember right...”

  It was so on-the-nose, I started to develop a headache.

  According to the H. P. Lovecraft novella The Shadow over Innsmouth, a trader in the early 1800s by the name of Obed Marsh brought back mystic practices from the Kanak people of the western Pacific and started a pagan cult called the Esoteric Order of Dagon. If the initial B on the invitation happened to stand for Barnabas, that would make him the elder Marsh’s grandson. It was all way too perfectly set up. Even the word “marsh” itself brought up imagery of swamps and bogs.

  “You know, he actually said he’d stop by and say hi at some point, but it doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen, does it...”

  Marsh himself is going to stop by? We’re staying for three days and two nights. If he doesn’t show up today, that only leaves tomorrow. Maybe he is supposed to be tomorrow’s special guest...?

  Saito eyed me.

  “Why do you ask, anyway?”

  “Oh, um... With the landslide blocking the road and all, I guess he won’t be able to make it, huh.”

  “Probably not. Unless he has a boat or something.”

  A boat... Maybe I should find one and have it ready just in case we need to make an escape at some point... Though heading out into the ocean in a tiny boat in these circumstances would almost feel suicidal. For now, we just need to keep moving.

  Reminding the two of them to be careful, I started walking over to the abandoned shrine Saito had been told about.

  ***

  The cicadas chittered happily as the bright afternoon sun cast dark shadows across the path. As I hurried toward the shrine in question, the smell of scorched earth filling my nose as it does all across rural Japan on some summer afternoons, I thought about everything that had happened so far.

  Putting together the objective facts we had learned, my initial thought was that the owner, one Mr. Marsh, had set his sights on either Mitsurugi or Saito and approached their agency. Once he had secured a significant business position, he’d invited them to his hotel, then kidnapped Mitsurugi to use as a sacrifice to Dagon.

  However, this was real life, not fantasy. If I were to seriously entertain the possibility of a story like this happening in twenty-first-century Japan, people would think I was absolutely out of my mind, to put it lightly. In fact, if the dungeons hadn’t already appeared, they’d have sent me straight to an institution.

  The dungeons had appeared, though—and the inside of them could almost be thought of as a reflection of all the cultures of humanity. If we took that fact into account, the incident we were faced with started feeling a lot more plausible.

  Still, that came with a big asterisk reminding us that it would only explain the existence of the phenomena themselves. It didn’t explain any actual reasoning. Would some kind of Ms. Maker-like entity actually go out of their way to get in with a talent agency just so they could kidnap someone?

  “No way in hell,” I muttered to myself as I kicked away the wild grass that was running rampant along the sides of the narrow path.

  The whole secret-cult-of-Dagon thing was just so perfectly lined up with Lovecraft’s novella that it reeked to high heaven of being fake. I’m sure if someone did a survey asking people if they thought Dagon actually existed, they’d be hard-pressed to find anything but negative responses. I would’ve answered no as well, for sure. Even if the dungeon had somehow caused him to come into existence, it’d be a tough sell to think he’d be out waltzing around the real world by land and by sea.

  Ages ago, Miyoshi once remarked, “What the heck is a ‘wild goblin’? If goblins were walking around alleyways, that would be terrifying!” That’s exactly how I felt about this. If you thought wild goblins were terrifying, nothing is gonna prepare you for when a wild Dagon appears!

  Speaking of reeking to high heaven, the writing on the panel at the church was just as suspicious. Sure, if it had been made in the 1600s, it would’ve made perfect sense for it to be in Spanish or Portuguese, meaning there was no problem with it being in Galician, since the language was used in the northwestern part of the same Iberian peninsula. In fact, it would’ve felt quite out of place if it had been written in English instead.

  However, the cult itself didn’t even come into being until the 1800s, and it supposedly happened in the United States. Even ignoring the fact that it was taken from a novella, if they had come here and put up the panel in that time frame, it would’ve made the most sense for it to have been written in English. The only way to rationalize it being in Galician was if they had first traveled from America to the Galicia region of Spain, then come here to Japan afterward. But that whole sequence of events was as puzzling as it was unlikely. It was much more realistic to believe that this was just someone’s elaborate scheme.

  “Is some organization or government trying to bait us into something?”

  It sounded like something out of a spy novel, even to me. But thinking about it, we’d taken sniper fire before—and for a while there, it had felt like we were handing mystery men over to Secret Agent Tanaka on a daily basis. Someone hatching a plot to abduct us would definitely not be all that far-fetched.

  “I guess that’s why we’re banned from traveling abroad...”

  If this is what happens when we travel domestically, maybe traveling to other countries isn’t such a good idea anyway.

  The problem, though, was the woman in the red dress. She was like a piece to a completely different puzzle—I couldn’t figure out where she fit into this whole thing. In terms of what was actually happening, the woman’s presence contributed absolutely nothing to the story, no matter who the culprit ended up being. Even if she was just thrown in to complicate things and give us information overload, what was the point of going through that much effort in the first place?

  The info we had heard and documents we had seen all had a sense of realism to them, from the squatter incident twenty-four years ago all the way back to the historical info from the 1600s. The secret cult of Dagon, though, was highly questionable. Even if it was supposed to foreshadow the current incident, it made absolutely no sense for the foreshadowing to have happened before Mitsurugi had even been born. Even the trading log felt way too well-made to be a forgery, and it didn’t make much sense to put together something so elaborate for this particular scenario in the first place.

  However, at the moment, fantasy was bleeding into reality. Nobody could say with certainty that something like the Golden Bough incident that happened in Tsukuba wasn’t happening again in the ocean at Wakasa—no matter how impossible it seemed.

  The mermaid legends of Wakasa, the secret cult of Dagon, the woman in the red dress, and a mysterious trading partner from who-knows-where. Are they all links in the same chain? Or maybe—

  As I turned the corner of the path, lost in thought, my destination finally came into view. The shrine was located at the far corner of a dead-end valley. There were weeds growing all over what presumably used to be the shrine grounds, but the building itself was oddly well-preserved.

  There were no signs of the undergrowth in the area having been trampled, so it appeared nobody had been there in a good while. Still, I had come all the way out here, so I approached the building to check it out just in case.

  All of my detection skills had been turned up to full blast, but nobody seemed to be around, at least in the immediate vicinity of the shrine. The inside of the building was caked in dust, with a flipped-over table and some unidentifiable stains on the ground. Whatever terrible final events happened there had left indelible marks, though there weren’t exactly corpses strewn about or anything. However, there were a few newspapers left behind, with the most recent being from August 8, 1995.